The Optimist's Daughter

by Eudora Welty

Dr. Courtland said, “Judge Mac, I’ve just managed to catch Dr. Kunomoto by the coat-tails over in Houston. You know, he taught me. He’s got a more radical method now, and he can fly here day after tomorrow—” “What for?” Judge McKelva said. “Nate, I hied myself away from home and comfort and tracked down here and put myself in your hands for one simple reason: I’ve got confidence in you. Now show me I’m still not too old to exercise good judgment.”

“You know, sir, this operation is not, in any hands, a hundred per cent predictable?” “Well, I’m an optimist.” “I didn’t know there were any more such animals,” said Dr. Courtland. “Never think you’ve seen the last of anything,” scoffed Judge McKelva. He answered the Doctor’s smile with a laugh that was like the snarl of triumph from an old grouch, and Dr. Courtland, taking the glasses the Judge held on his knees, gently set them back onto his nose.

“If Courtland’s all that much, he better put in a better claim on how good this is going to turn out,” said Fay. “And he’s not so perfect—I saw him spank that nurse.”

Laurel stood near him, waiting. “What’s the verdict?” her father presently asked, in a parched voice. “Eh, Polly?” He called Laurel by her childhood name. “What’s your mother have to say about me?” “Look-a-here!” exclaimed Fay. She jumped up and pattered toward his bed in her stockinged feet. “Who’s this?” She pointed to the gold button over her breastbone.

Laurel, when he’d gone, went to the pay telephone in the corridor. She called her studio; she was a professional designer of fabrics in Chicago. “No point in you staying just because the doctor said so,” said Fay when Laurel hung up. She had listened like a child. “Why, I’m staying for my own sake,” said Laurel.

Fay leaned over the bed and said, “I’m glad you can’t see yourself, hon.” Judge McKelva gave out a shocking and ragged sound, a snore, and firmed his mouth. He asked, “What’s the time, Fay?” “That sounds more like you,” she said, but didn’t tell him the time. “It was that old ether talking when he came to before,” she said to Laurel. “Why, he hadn’t even mentioned Becky, till you and Courtland started him.”

The Hibiscus was a half hour’s ride away on the city’s one remaining streetcar line, but through the help of one of the floor nurses, Laurel and Fay were able to find rooms there by the week. It was a decayed mansion on a changing street; what had been built as its twin next door was a lesson to it now: it was far along in the course of being demolished.

the Hibiscus seemed to be in the sole charge of a cat on a chain, pacing the cracked-open floral tiles that paved the front gallery.

Laurel and Fay were hardly ever in the same place at the same time, except during the hours when they were both asleep in their rooms at the Hibiscus. These were adjoining—really half rooms; the partition between their beds was only a landlord’s strip of wallboard. Where there was no intimacy, Laurel shrank from contact; she shrank from that thin board and from the vague apprehension that some night she might hear Fay cry or laugh like a stranger at something she herself would rather not know.

Her father left his questions unasked. But both knew, and for the same reason, that bad days go better without any questions at all.

One day, she had the luck to detect an old copy of Nicholas Nickleby on the dusty top shelf in the paperback store. That would reach his memory, she believed, and she began next morning reading it to her father. He did not ask her to stop; neither could he help her when she lost their place. Of course, she was not able to read aloud with her mother’s speed and vivacity—that was probably what he missed.

She was not sure he was listening to the words. “Is that all?” his patient voice asked, when she paused.

Judge McKelva had years ago developed a capacity for patience, ready if it were called on. But in this affliction, he seemed to Laurel to lie in a dream of patience. He seldom spoke now unless he was spoken to, and then, which was wholly unlike him, after a wait—as if he had to catch up.

He lay more and more with both eyes closed.

Fay came in and caught Laurel sitting up asleep herself, in her spectacles. “Putting your eyes out, too? I told him if he hadn’t spent so many years of his life poring over dusty old books, his eyes would have more strength saved up for now,” Fay told her.

She thought the time had come to know Fay a little better.

“My family?” said Fay. “None of ’em living. That’s why I ever left Texas and came to Mississippi. We may not have had much, out in Texas, but we were always so close. Never had any secrets from each other, like some families.

After Papa died, we all gave up everything for Mama, of course. Now that she’s gone, I’m glad we did. Oh, I wouldn’t have run off and left anybody that needed me. Just to call myself an artist and make a lot of money.”

Fay helped Judge McKelva with his supper—mostly by taking bite for bite.

Laurel stood, and said goodnight. “Dr. Courtland believes the time’s almost here to try your pinhole specs,” she dared to add. “Do you hear, Father?” He, who had been the declared optimist, had not once expressed hope. Now it was she who was offering it to him. And it might be false hope. There was no response in the room. Judge McKelva, like Mr. Dalzell, lay in the dark, and Fay crouched in the rocker, one cheek on the windowsill, with a peep on the crack. Laurel went reluctantly away.

Mrs. Martello came panting up to Laurel, heavy on her rubber heels. “She laid hands on him! She said if he didn’t snap out of it, she’d—” The veneer of nurse slipped from Mrs. Martello—she pushed up at Laurel the red, shocked face of a Mississippi countrywoman as her voice rose to a clear singsong. “She taken ahold of him. She was abusing him.”

“I think she was fixing to pull him out of that bed. I think she thought she could!

Mrs. Martello added wildly, “She’s not a nurse!” She swung her starched body around and sent her voice back toward Judge McKelva’s door. “What’s the matter with ...

In the waiting room, Fay stood being patted by an old woman who was wearing bedroom slippers and holding a half-eaten banana in her free hand. “Night after night, sitting up there with him, putting the food in his mouth, giving him his straw, letting him use up my cigarettes, keeping him from thinking!” Fay was crying on the woman’s bosom. “Then to get hauled out by an uppity nurse who doesn’t know my business from hers!”

“Fay, it can’t be much more serious. The doctor’s closed in with Father now.” “Never speak to me again!” shrieked Fay without turning around. “That nurse dragged me and pushed me, and you’re the one let her do it!”

“I couldn’t save him.” He laid a hand on the sleeve of each woman, standing between them. He bent his head, but that did not hide the aggrievement, indignation, that was in his voice. “He’s gone, and his eye was healing.” “Are you trying to tell me you let my husband die?” Fay cried.

Laurel felt the Doctor’s hand shift to grip her arm; she had been about to go straight to the unattended. He began walking the two women toward the elevators. Laurel became aware that he was in evening clothes.

“Maybe we asked too much of him,” he said grudgingly.

Fay said, “I knew better than let you go in that eye to start with. That eye was just as bright and cocky as yours is right now. He just took a scratch from an old rose briar! He would have got over that, it would all be forgotten now! Nature would have tended to it. But you thought you knew better!”

Dr. Courtland looked at her briefly, as if he had seen many like Fay.

In a moment he said, “He helped me through medical school, kept me going when Daddy died. A sacrifice in those days. The Depression hit and he helped me get my start.” “Some things don’t bear going into,” Laurel said, “No,” he said. “No.”

He said then, “Laurel, there’s nobody from home with you. Would you care to put up with us for the rest of the night?

Laurel shook her head.

“As soon as you-all finish at the office, I’ll send you where you’re going, with something for you both to make you sleep.” “All I hope is you lay awake tonight and remember how little you were good for!” cried Fay.

“I’ll phone Adele,” he said to Laurel. That was his sister in Mount Salus. “You can take him home tomorrow.” Still he did not turn to go back into the building, but stood there by the car, his hand on the door he had closed. He gave the drawn-out moment up to uselessness. She felt it might have been the hardest thing he had done all day, or all his life. “I wish I could have saved him,” he said. Laurel touched her hand to the window glass. He waved then, and quickly turned. “Thank you for nothing!” Fay screamed above the whirr of their riding away.

Fay grabbed Laurel’s arm as she would have grabbed any stranger’s. “I saw a man—I saw a man and he was dressed up like a skeleton and his date was in a long white dress, with snakes for hair, holding up a bunch of lilies! Coming down the steps of that house like they’re just starting out!”

The cat was off its chain and let inside; it turned its seamed face to look at them and pranced up the staircase and waited for them on the landing, dressed in a monkey coat sewn with sequins. “All on my birthday. Nobody told me this was what was going to happen to me!” Fay cried before she slammed her door.

Laurel lay in the dark waiting for it to reach its end. The house took longer than Fay did to go to sleep; the city longer than the house.

They got away in the afternoon. Judge McKelva’s body was on board the smooth New Orleans-Chicago train he had always so enjoyed travelling on; he had taken full pleasure in the starched white damask tablecloths, the real rosebud in the silver vase, the celery crisp on ice, the strawberries fresh from Hammond in their season; and the service. The days of the train itself were numbered now.

Fay had kicked off her shoes. She lay with her head turned away, not speaking.

“They’re all Father’s friends, Fay. They’re exactly the ones he’d have counted on to be here in the house to meet us,” she said. “And I count on them.” “Well, it’s evermore unfair. I haven’t got anybody to count on but me, myself, and I.” Fay’s eyes travelled to the one man in the gathering and she accused him. “I haven’t got one soul.” She let out a cry, and streaked up the stairs.

When he came back, almost immediately, his step was even heavier. Straight-armed, he carried at full length on its hanger a suit of black winter clothes. It swayed more widely than he swayed in negotiating the turn on the landing. There was a shoebox in his other hand and a leather case under his arm. “She’s sending me down to Pitts’, Tennyson,” he said. “Carrying him these.”

Upstairs, the bedroom door was rather weakly slammed. Laurel had never heard it slammed before. She went and laid her cheek for a moment against Major Bullock’s, aware of the tears on it and the bourbon on his breath.

“NOW WHAT COULD they want,” said old Mrs. Pease, who stood at the front window parting the draperies. “Polly,” warned Miss Adele. Everyone turned, and those seated stood up, as two equally fat women and a man walked past Miss Adele into the parlor. “I said this had to be the right spot, because it looks like the very house to hold a big funeral,” said the old fat woman. “Where’s Wanda Fay? I don’t see her.”

“A grand coffin my little girl’s afforded. Makes me jealous.”

“I’m Mrs. Chisom from Madrid, Texas. I’m Wanda Fay’s mother,” the fat lady said to Laurel. “And this is some of my other children—Sis, from Madrid, Texas, and Bubba, from Madrid, Texas. We got a few others that rather not come in.”

“Well, if you’re wondering how long it took us, I made it from Madrid in close on to eight hours,” the man in the windbreaker said. Madrid was pronounced with the accent as in Mildred.

Laurel tried to draw back her finger. Mrs. Chisom let it go in order to poke her in the side as if to shame her. “So you ain’t got father, mother, brother, sister, husband, chick nor child. Not a soul to call on, that’s you.”

This girl here’s surrounded by her oldest friends!”

“And listen further: bank’s closed, most of the Square’s agreed to close for the hour of services, county offices closed. Courthouse has lowered its f...